Out sourced, out manoeuvred

To listen to the media, out sourcing is the answer to almost all our prayers. The great Indian solution. The fillip the economy needs. You read all those fashionable business catch phrases in articles about it. I’ve been looking up articles and newspaper editorials on the subject, and somehow, most of it seems to me to be determinedly, almost hysterically, cheerful.

Many people seem to have accepted the governments dictate that it’s a Good Thing, and is the solution to a lot of our problems. The industry is growing, more people are drifting into call centers and other bpo offices, and everyone’s happy. The ideal way to make a quick buck. Experience doesn’t matter, neither does education – some places are now hiring even high school dropouts.

Ah, now a few articles about how theres a lot of stress. How theres a high turnover – anywhere from 20 to 80%. How people are burnt out. (Not bad. Finally!) But no, just a few voices saying these few things and that’s the end of objective analysis of the concept. Case closed. Verdict: its still a fantastic thing for us.

Of course, all this was in the beginning. Now nobody has the time to discuss such things – it’s a matter of percentage growth, potential revenue and national averages. Economics steps forward yet again to kindly provide us with the numbers and indices we so willingly blind ourselves with. The focus now, is on remedying the “disparities” in demand and supply of labour and other such obstacles which stand in the way of our becoming an outsourcing haven.

One of the worrying things about the outsourcing trend is the totally skewed set of priorities in development issues. One of the pet peeves of companies in outsourcing is the sub standard infrastructure in our country. So before we provide people with decent drinking water, health care and sanitation, we are racking our brains on how to connect them to the global market.

I spoke to someone recently – this lady is into mental health and behavioural research. She was explaining how her organisation (in the us) was doing research amongst people working in the call centres and the things they learned in the studies. She also explained the kind of stress management programs they were testing and trying out.

Hang on a minute. As far as I know, most of the outsourcing happens from the us or the uk. They make money by sending us the dirty work to do and paying less for it, as well as by telling us how its bad for us and what we need to do to cope with it? Wow. Breath taking dual standards!

If we look at the chunk of the work done in outsourcing here, its way down in the value addition chain. the kind of work that is being outsourced is mostly jobs that are repetitive and (lets face it) plain boring. That’s why theyre so stressful. That’s why the first world doesn’t want to do it. (rather like the forest products trade embargo merry-go-round you know.)

When I was swapping views with one of my friends, she came up with this angle, which I thought was very interesting. She said, by advertising ourselves as cheap labour, we are simply dooming ourselves to coolie status. Nobody respects our brain pool here because we have succeeded in branding ourselves as “cheap skilled labour”. You stand a chance only by fleeing to some other country where “cheap” isn’t the USP. I think there may be something in that.

it’s a lethal situation: given the choice in a nation of primarily poor people between a regular job (intellectually stimulating in the usual degree but of normal pay) and a job that’s mundane but will fetch so much more money… which way will a person fall? Which way will a school kid fall? Wait and slog through college, or drop out in eleventh standard? Got to hand it to them you know, they do set traps well these days.

In a global socio-economic order where there is a price tag on everything, money is certainly a whole lot of power. The first world can afford to make dirty deals like outsourcing, and we will continue to foolishly and greedily try to play their game.

Theres an incredible amount of stress in just schooling ones self to live an alien culture and assume an alien identity when one is surrounded by a totally different environment. Theres a whole host of health problems caused simply by the insane hours of work. Theres also added complication in the form of alienation from peers and family, work pressures, dealing with abusive customers or clients who feel they’ve a right to be aggressive because their jobs have been stolen. (ironically even within a bpo, the trend is moving towards filling supervisory and executive positions by hiring foreigners, so actually what we get is the dregs of the jobs.) It’s a cess pool out there.

Maybe we will realise how dangerous a deal we are pushing for by the time the current generation of youth reaches its forties amidst depression, stress and other health disorders, and complete burnout.

Maybe it will also be too late then.